Canine coronavirus strain found in humans
A new study has shown that some pneumonia patients have tested positive for a coronavirus strain associated with dogs. Copyright: Image by Andrea Bohl from Pixabay. This image has been cropped.
Several pneumonia patients in Malaysia’s Sarawak state have tested positive for a coronovirus strain associated with dogs, according to a study.
Genome sequencing of the coronavirus identified it as a novel canine-feline recombinant alphacoronavirus, which was named CCoV-HuPn-2018. The study, published May in Clinical Infectious Diseases, says it is the first to report this type of coronavirus being detected in a human pneumonia patient.
CCoV-HuPn-2018, if confirmed as a pathogen, may be the eighth unique coronavirus that can make humans ill.
Coronaviruses already known to infect humans include SARS-CoV-1, known to cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an outbreak of which occurred in 2002— 2004; MERS-CoV, which causes the Middle East respiratory syndrome, first detected in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.
All these diseases are zoonotic, meaning they can jump from animals to humans. SARS-CoV-1 is suspected to have jumped to humans from bats or civets, MERS-CoV from camels and SARS-CoV-2 from bats or minks.
Samples taken in 2017— 2018 from eight of 301 hospitalised patients tested positive for the CCoV-HuPn-2018 coronavirus strain. Of these eight patients, seven were less than five years old, lived in rural areas and were frequently exposed to animals, both wild and domesticated. Most belonged to one of several indigenous ethnic groups in Sarawak. All patients recovered after four to six days in hospital.
There are various unknowns about the virus at this stage, says Gregory Gray, an author of the study and infectious diseases professor at the Global Health Institute, Duke University, US. These include how domesticated animals such as dogs and cats can get infected with a coronavirus strain, how they can infect humans, and whether human-to-human transmission is possible.
According to Gray, what is important is that these coronaviruses may be spilling over to humans from animals much more frequently than is known. “We are proposing future epidemiological studies to answer such questions,” Gray tells SciDev.Net.
“Our findings underscore the public health threat of animal coronaviruses and a need to conduct better surveillance for them,” the researchers wrote in the study. Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that have crown-like spikes on their surface.
